The Symposia, 1933 — 2003

1984: Recombination at the DNA Level, Vol. XLIX

Organizer: Amar J. S. Klar and Jeffrey N. Strathern

The previous Symposium with “recombination” in the
title had been held only six years before, and then recombination
had formed the smaller part of the meeting that included also
replication. Recombination had also been part of the Symposium
on Movable Genetic Elements. Why was it felt that a third meeting
was needed, three in the space of six years?

The main reason was that Frank Stahl’s prediction in his
summary of the 1978 meeting had come true–the torch had
passed from the geneticists to the biochemists. Moreover, recombinant
DNA tools and techniques were now part and parcel of research
and no longer restricted to a small coterie of laboratories. This
meant that great science was being done by many more and this
was reflected in the great diversity of the studies reported in
this Symposium. Indeed, Alan Campbell in his summary commented
on this diversity and would not predict whether common principles
would ever emerge to unify recombination in all these systems.

A large number of studies used movable genetic elements as tools
to analyze the integration of these DNA molecules as models for
recombination at the chromosome scale. The bacterial transposons
Tn5

and Tn10 were in evidence, as well as a set of papers reporting
studies using the bacteriophage Mu. Research on Mu had been promoted
by Ahmed Bukhari at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Just a few
months after the Symposium, and at the tragically young aged of
40, Bukhari died of a heart attack. The volume was dedicated to
him.

A very interesting set of papers dealt with recombination in
mammalian cells, between plasmids introduced into the cells, between
two introduced plasmids, and a plasmid and sequences integrated
into the chromosome. These studies led a few years later to practicable
methods for manipulating genes in mammalian cells and, when applied
to mouse embryonic stem cells, to the ability to change very precisely
DNA sequences in a mouse.